Put the Clip Down and Your Hands Up

Eclecticity has posted a fascinating video on how to construct a weapon in the workplace.

My main thought after viewing it was: Who has the time to toy around with common office equipment and create a zip gun?

On the other hand, the darned thing is so creative it may become mandatory viewing for airport screeners.

Fitness and Crime Update

This in from The Onion: Nation's Joggers Sick of Finding Dead Bodies.

Vote for me! I'm Irish! At least as of last week.

13th Floor blog has a report on an Illinois law that covers instances where you've changed your name within the past three years and then run for office.

Its requirement? That your old name be on the ballot along with your new one.

It appears that some candidates have made convenient name changes in order to attract the ethnic vote.

[Dead citizens in Cook county, however, will still be permitted to cast ballots for either name.]

Evil in Gray Pinstripes

There's a lawsuit against a bank that gives life insurance to Palestinian suicide bombers.

Click here for the bizarre and chilling story.

Mortimer's Miscellany

Sir John Mortimer, author of the charming Rumpole of the Bailey series as well as other books, is wowing them with a one-man show in London. An excerpt from Charles Spencer’s review in The Telegraph:

A pianist plays popular classics and La Vie en rose and Mortimer regales us with his apparently fathomless, if not always entirely unfamiliar, stock of anecdotes, many of them involving the legal life. I particularly loved the story of the judge, due to deliver his summing up, who assembled counsel to explain that he had inadvertently left his speech at home. "Fax it up, my lord," suggested one QC helpfully. "Yes it does, rather," replied the absent-minded judge.

There are fond memories, too, of Mortimer's father, the blind divorce lawyer who has inspired so much of his son's work and life, not least in that funny and poignant memory play A Voyage Round My Father, superbly revived last year.

Mortimer père was a man who once proved adultery in a divorce case with reference to a pair of footprints, upside down, on the dashboard of an Austin 7. No son could be prouder of his dad when Mortimer describes the incident.

Life and Interview Questions

I once saw a job application that asked the applicant to list magazines that he or she reads on a regular basis. Later, I learned that the company's CEO held strong opinions regarding pornography so if you listed anything wilder than Reader's Digest or Field and Stream then your odds of making it to the interview were slight.

Although it is easy to mock the use of magazine tastes as a job standard, there's something admirable about a question that goes beyond the "Just the facts" Dragnet style. You can find employment interviews that are so stilted and lawyer-bound that although the company may be assured that it has selected a qualified candidate, it may be less confident that it has chosen a human being. Couple that with the applicants who've gone through Machiavellian interview workshops and it is understandably refreshing when something spontaneous actually slips out before an oral board.

I've advised job seekers to ignore the standard notion that hobbies and outside interests should be omitted. Adding those can humanize the contender. There are obvious exceptions - an interest in ballet might not land that off-shore oil drilling job - but set those aside and you have quite a bit of running room.

This may just be a quirk on my part. I can already hear the heart palpitations of HR professionals who shudder at the thought of letting first-line supervisors stray from the hygenically approved questions and yet there is a cautious, quasi-Victorian, aspect to the current process that begs for reform. As the Spanish anarchist saying went, "If they give you lined paper, write against the lines."

Not always, of course, but just enough to show you're breathing.

Quote of the Day

I'm not an old, experienced hand at politics. But I am seasoned enough to have learned that the hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.

- Adlai Stevenson

News from The Pusher Man

Attention BlackBerry addicts!

USA Today reports:


BlackBerry maker Research In Motion on Monday introduced a new version of its top-end e-mail phone for business users, replacing the signature side navigation wheel with a front trackball that first appeared last year on the consumer-oriented BlackBerry Pearl.

The BlackBerry 8800 will be offered in the United States by AT&T's Cingular Wireless starting Feb. 21, priced at $300 with a two-year contract commitment.

Crisis Cuisine

I recall reading that Wal-Mart sends special shipments of beer and Pop Tarts to stores in areas about to be hit by hurricanes since people want to drink beer while putting plywood over their windows and then munch Pop Tarts when the power goes out.

This has created a whole new cuisine and now there's a cookbook for those disasters:

Apocalypse Chow.

[HT: Instapundit ]

Entrepreneur for the Eccentric

An inspirational story for Monday morning: A man with a passion for unicycles and banjos first starts a unicycle business and then…well, read his tale. An excerpt:

Unicycle.com went live on March 31, 1999, an event that was largely unnoticed. We had announced our grand-opening date on a unicycle newsgroup a few weeks before—but no one showed up. Eleven days later we finally received an order confirmation—not for a unicycle, but for a $13 rear-view mirror that mounts on sunglasses. We were so excited! By April 30 we'd sold $1,000 in products. Our new toll-free number brought even more orders, with Amy juggling calls, changing diapers and getting Wishbone to stop barking. By the end of October, we were averaging $11,000 a month in sales. Then I lost my job at IBM.

[BTW: Here are the links to his unicycle site and his banjo site.]

[HT: Teri’s Brain ]